The main piece in his miscellany is entitled, "Immigrants? They're just what this nation needs". He kicks off from the entirely socialist perspective of believing that every old person is entitled to be maintained by the state via a pension.

He says,

"In all the brouhaha, the salient fact has been missed: we're in the pensions jam because there are not enough people coming on track as wealth creators to support thos country's rapidly ageing population.

The more we have, the earlier we can retire; simple. Let's have more people on this almost empty isle".

He goes on to make a lame Viagra joke, suggests paying aborters not to have abortions and finally gets to the meat.

"And let's tell every asylum-seeker already here that they can stay, and let it be known from Bangladesh to Belarus that we are open for the business of hard-woring young immigrants whose efforts could keep us in the ...wonderland of our early sixties that we had been looking forward to".

Galloway is a member of that section of the British public born between 1945 and 1955. Some call them 'the luckiest generation'; I would call them the greediest. There are, of course, many exceptions to this observation - but as time passes the more easily my conclusion comes to mind.

They were mostly born in clean, brand-new NHS hospitals. Their parents never had to pay for healthcare. Mostly, they received excellent educations in selective grammar schools for no charge. They either went to university to gain a meaningful degree or learned a trade and could go straight into stable long-term employment. The state made no demands upon them to perform National Service. They rebelled against their parents, avidly embracing drug culture, sexual licence and the permissive society, sowing the seeds of the present pensions crisis by canmpaigning for the legalisation of abortion in 1967.

Then came the 1970's, when it got scary. Most of the '70's was a time when they couldn't get what they wanted when they wanted - so in 1979 they voted for someone who said they would give it to them, and they've been voting that way ever since, with what they want as their sole motivation, and the good of the nation be damned.

Many of them have become quite wealthy in the process.

They would quite happily destroy the fabric of the country if it means that they will get their old-age pensions - and Galloway is nothing more than a perfect poster-child for the attitudes of a large number of his generation.

(Correction 9/12/2005-

Laban Tall, a fellow British blogger, was kind enough to link to this post after reading some comments I placed on a post at Freedom & Whisky. The ubiquitous, and it would seem grotesquely ill-mannered even by my standards, individual known as 'Dearieme', who hovers round the British blogging circuit like a fly round shite while seeming to possess neither the wits nor the balls to run a blog of their own, has pointed out a factual error.

When the NHS was started, the hospitals from which it operated were mostly not 'brand new'.